Performance Tweaks
This section is a work in progress, and needs a lot of work, especially the format. Data taken from personal experience, posts on the Vanguard forums, Mort's game tweaks, and Ralsu's guide at www.tentonhammer.com = GENERAL Tweaks = A) Defragment after install or patching. Seriously, this has a HUGE impact on the game's performance. Use Power Defragmenter and Contig to defrag the Vanguard folder after patching. See my post on the Vanguard forums for instructions HERE B) Update your videocard drivers. Note that forcing settings in your driver's control panel, like Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering, may have adverse affects ingame. Latest Driver Links: * Nvidia Official Windows XP 32bit Drivers * Nvidia Beta Drivers * Nvidia Windows XP 64bit Drivers * Nvidia 8800 XP Drivers * Nvidia 8800 Windows XP 64bit Drivers * Nvidia Vista Beta Drivers * ATI Windows XP 32bit Drivers * ATI Windows XP 64bit Drivers * ATI Vista 32bit Drivers * ATI Vista 64bit Drivers C) Download + Install RivaTuner 2.0, go into the DirectX software settings, and set the card to force shading at 2.0. (some newer games REQUIRE shader 3.0 and will not run without it. REMEMBER if you set this tweak so that if you have any problems in other games you can undo it) D) In the in-game settings, change sound settings to "Hardware" E) In the in-game settings, set the resolution to 1024x768 F) In the in-game settings, turn off HDR G) NVidia 6xxx series users, Tru using the older "71" series drivers HERE H) ATI users having difficulties may have success by uninstalling the current ATI Drivers (and rebooting) and rolling back to an older driver. Some people have had luck with the following drivers: * ATI Catalyst-6.8 * ATI Catalyst-6.7 I) TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. J) One other setting I found gave me a nice FPS boost involves turning down DirectX Intellisample Settings. Yes, detail will be a tad lower, but its a nice tradeoff. I have not tried this with an ATI card, so I cannot vouch for ATI users. If you downloaded RivaTuner 2.0 (from Step C above), open it. In the Main Tab, under Driver Settings, click the button next to Customize, then click the Direct Draw and Direct 3D Settings button. Click on the Intellisample Tab, and move the slider to one of the four settings. I've found the second setting to be a nice balance of speed and Image Quality on my Nvidia 7800 GT. Click OK twice and start up the game. = VGCLIENT.INI Tweaks = To access the settings in-game: Press the ESC key to bring up the main menu. Then choose the Settings button. The first tab of the new menu that pops up is the Video settings. This is the focus of this guide. To find the ini file: Navigate to your Vanguard folder on your computer (C:\Program Files\Sony\Vanguard by default where C'' = the letter of the drive on which you installed the game). Double-click on the bin folder and look for the file called '''vgclient.ini', which should open in Notepad when you double-click it. General * UseJoystick=False (I don't know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS) * AnisotropicFiltering=0 (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card's properties and change this there as well * ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well) * TextureDetailWorld=5 (this controls the texture details, changing this over the last couple patches can make textures display strangely. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed textures to 7 being lowest texture detail) * RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into "very high" mode but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you the special effects of very high with the memory requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings. This can range from 1-5, 5 being the most detailed textures to 1 being lowest texture detail) * FarClippingPlane=100000 Adjusts how far the game tries to draw objects into your world. High end systems use 250000 or 300000, low end systems use 100000 to 200000. * GlobalSimpleTerrain=False When turned on, this option provides less details about your terrain in order to give you a better overall picture. * bShowClouds=False Turns off detailed clouds, HUGE performance increase when turned off. * MaxStaticLights=4 Determines the number of lights shining from different angles. Max is 16 for Higher end systems. * ShowBloom=False Turns off bloom lighting, which spreads out the light in a scene to increase quality. * bUseHDR=False When this option is on, the contrast between light and dark areas will be more pronounced and the world will appear more lifelike. Your graphics card must support floating-point blending to use High Dynamic Range (HDR). * bUseToneMapping=False This option helps blend light tones in the world to more realistically simulate how our eyes adjust to light. With it turned off, you may notice stark contrasts between an area that is well-lit versus an area that is in the shadows. Turning on Tone Mapping makes your graphics card work harder to render the environment. * GlobalAtmosphere=0 This option adjusts how much distance blur you see when HDR draws light and dark areas. This setting only works if HDR is on. * GlobalShadows=0.250000 Turns down Shadows in the game, another big performance increase here. You can also use 0 and disable shadows. * GlobalSpecular=0.250000 Affects the reflective surfaces in the game to include water and armor. Devs have stated that reflective graphics still need a lot of tuning. * GlobalShaderLOD=0.250000 Adjusts the overall quality of every effect generated by shaders. * GlobalReflectiveDistance=50000 Adjusts the distance (measured in cm) at which reflective surfaces refract light. Max setting is 100000 D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice * UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail) * UseTripleBuffering=True (Only do this if you also set the vsync) * UseVSync=True (it gave me a few extra FPS) ALAudio.ALAudioSubsystem * UseEAX=False This setting does nothing right now, so its best to leave it at False * Use3DSound=True Does affect performance a bit, but not much. Most current soundcards work fine with this setting enabled. * UseSound=False (You lose the sound but can pick up nearly 5-10 FPS!!!) Side note: instead of turning sound off you CAN set LowQualitySound=True instead! (NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for these two and don't flip between low/med at all in-game since that would reset this change) = Tweaks Debunked = In other guides, some people recommend modifying CacheSizeMegs in the sysconfig.ini file. That tweak no longer works, according to Hobart@Sigil * bUseShaderCaching=True This setting was removed from the INI file late in Beta and does nothing if added to the INI * iShaderCacheSizeMB=10 Added when bUseShaderCaching was removed. Setting this value to anything higher than 10 will have no performance increase on your system. Just look at the size of your files in your \bin\cache\ folder. Personally I've never seen them higher than 2MB or so. Also, setting this to zero would probably be a bad thing. Sources: Guide to ini Optimization @ tentonhammer Mort's game tweaks From Vanguard Saga of Heroes, a Wikia wiki. Category:Guides